Three professors at Fudan University have been punished and two postgraduate students expelled following investigations into three cases of plagiarism, Fudan officials announced yesterday.

Fudan's academic ethics committee has suggested the university not renew a work contract with Lu Xiaoyong, a retiring professor at Fudan's foreign language school.

Chi Fanglu, professor at the university's affiliated medical school, and Gu Ning, associate dean of Fudan's school of information technology, have been deprived of the right to enroll postgraduate students for the next two years.

It is the first time the 102-year-old university has published details of punishment for academic plagiarism since it introduced an ethics code in 2005.

"Fudan deserves applause for voluntarily publishing its scandal. But it is the country's evaluation and management systems that help motivate students to plagiarize for better degrees and better pay," said Xiong Bingqi, a Jiao Tong university professor.

In May, the academic ethics committee received information from a university faculty in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, accusing Lu and four young teachers of plagiarism in a textbook they had written.

Investigations suggested that the group's textbook was largely copied from similar foreign textbooks. Lu accepted responsibility for this and confessed in September.

Fudan is now recalling all the textbooks so that they can be destroyed. Funding for Lu's research programs is also expected to be withdrawn, the committee announced.

As well, a message appeared on an Internet bulletin board in July challenging a thesis produced by a Fudan post-doctoral.

The message claimed that Liu Hongjian, the researcher who carried out his post-doctoral program at Fudan, used photographs of experiments that were not his own and without permission.

Chi was Liu's thesis instructor at that time and although he had no direct responsibility, he was held culpable for sloppy supervision.

Fudan officials said they withdrew Liu's post-doctoral certificate after the accusation was investigated and found to be true. Chi was disqualified from enrolling postgraduate students for two years.

Another case involved Ye Wei, a doctoral candidate at the school of information technology, who was charged with offering the same article for publication in English and Chinese journals.

Moreover the article was remarkably similar to a paper published by an overseas researcher.

Ye was expelled by Fudan earlier this month. Gu, Ye's instructor, was also disqualified from enrolling postgraduate students for two years.

(Shanghai Daily December 26, 2007)